A profile of Rashid Sunyaev

Science : In 1960, at the height of the cold war, Rashid Sunyaev left his home in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, to study physics in Moscow. He was then 17 years old, with exceptional mathematical talent—the kind of student the Soviet government would have liked to groom into a weapons scientist. With genuine apprehension, Sunyaev’s grandmother asked him to make a promise: Could young Rashid stay away from work that might help in the building of missiles and bombs?Half a century later, she would have been proud of her grandson, who now directs the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and is a chief scientist at the Space Research Institute in Moscow. Not only did Sunyaev manage to keep his word about avoiding secret military programs, but he also helped unlock secrets of the universe that are now pillars of modern cosmology.